To paraphrase Bernie Sanders, “People are sick of hearing about your damn wall.” So maybe Trump accepts this latest “border security deal” … or not. Who knows with him? What if Ann Coulter calls him a wimp again?
But what’s fer sure is that this farce has sucked up way — way — too much oxygen. You and I get that Trump needs a long-running, racist distraction to keep the crowd who wear their MAGA hats to church and formal occasions hootin’ and hollerin’ for him. But the rest of us long ago did the math and wrote the wall off as the blatant idiocy it is.
That said, I’m regularly surprised that so little of the reporting on Trump’s wall ever gets around to putting the real world price tag on this, uh, “idea”.
Very few reporters/pundits following the wall story ever factor in the cost of a nearly 2000-mile barrier, beyond the cash needed for construction … which would be a fraction of the cost of buying out property owners across the desert and down the Rio Grande.
How much could that amount to, you ask? Try on $448 billion for size.
An Atlantic article by Texas-based writer Richard Parker points out one of those teeny, tiny little details that neither Trump or his talk radio puppet-masters ever mentions. Namely, huge chunks of US border-land are owned not by pushover mom and pop tomato farmers, but seriously well-connected, well-heeled ranchers, who know a thing or two about making the gummint pay maximum value for anything it wants from them.
Says Parker, “If President Donald Trump ever gets the funding for his long-promised wall, he will have to plot a course through Texas. But he will never make it all the way through here, the 800-mile stretch from Laredo to nearly El Paso. There will be no ‘concrete structure from sea to sea’, as the president once pledged. Taking this land would constitute an assault on private property and require a veritable army of lawyers, who, I can assure you, are no match for the state’s powerful border barons.”
Parker points out that where Texas has bought up any land from private citizens, costs for acquisition alone are running at $19.4 million per mile.
“I know this place,” says Parker. “I’m a Texan who grew up a border rat. And though I’m no cowboy, until recently I lived on a working cow-calf operation, and I know a few ranchers. Over the years, some have allowed me to hunt and fish on their land and treated me like family. So I can say this, generally speaking: Although many big ranchers and landowners backed Trump, they are conservative in the most traditional senses. They actually believe in small government, free enterprise, free trade, and private property. And nobody puts a wall through their brush.”
There are also several seriously heavyweight families who own huge chunks of property from Laredo to El Paso. People who actually know how to cut a deal … if you know what I mean.
Says Parker, “Here is the final, insurmountable barrier to Trump’s wall: money. The government has already paid nearly $1 million an acre for [a] six-acre plot in the Rio Grande Valley, potentially setting a precedent. If the Trump administration seized 700 miles of private land along the border, one mile wide—640 acres per square mile—the tab could come to $448 billion. Nearly 20 times the wall itself.”
So yeah. As you and I know. Stupid. A complete waste of time and money. But it’d be nice to hear the press routinely roll numbers like that into the national conversation about “the wall.”
A quick related story from a road trip down to the Rio Grande last summer.
Big Bend National Park is, well, big. And in the summer, really hot and really quiet. If you like deserts and quiet like I do, its beautiful.
So I’m merrily rolling along, 20, 30, 40 miles of two-lane all to myself. Windows down, loud music. Bliss, baby.
I pull over into a scenic overlook for a first view of the Rio Grande, still 10 miles off through the heat haze. I get out and stretch, taking in the sublime silence for a good 10 minutes … until, blub, blub, blub … I hear and then see this gargantuan King Ranch Edition Ford F-250 dripping with garish chrome pipes and Texas plates. It pulls over into my sacred silent space.
“(Bleep),” I say, “one of those dorks.” By which I mean your average, “My carbon footprint is bigger than your carbon footprint, gun-licking, MAGA-hat wearing chowderhead.” I make this immediate assessment based on my highly scientific, on-going demographic survey on how your choice of vehicle tells me everything I need to know about you.
Reverie ruined, I take off. For the border, 20 minutes further down the road. At the river itself, at majestic St. Elena Canyon, I park and begin the five-minute walk through the scrub and tamarisk out onto the mud flats.
As I walk I hear it again. Blub, blub, blub.
“Bleep.” But I keep walking.
I’m strolling back and forth on the flats taking pictures and soaking in impressions of the sheer canyon walls stretching away miles to the west and southeast when I hear the approach of footsteps slapping through the mud. … right up to within three feet of me. He’s a tall white guy in maybe his mid-Fifties. No MAGA hat. Just a Longhorns baseball cap, t-shirt, shorts and sandals.
I’m thinking, “Pal, there’s four hundred yards of open space here. Can’t you find some place else to go and not bug me with your no doubt shithead, ‘God bless ‘Murica’ bullshit? Or whatever it is you’re going to spout?”. But he’s running his eyes up and down the canyon until he stops and says — to me, I guess, since there’s no one else around, “Do you suppose that stupid fucker even knows there’s already a wall here?”
Dude! Fist bump!
Moral of the story: Appearances, and choice of vehicle, do not always tell the whole story.